The self-driving cars bill may be navigating its way through parliament in 2024 but another hands-off, equally controversial, form of transport is also accelerating this year: drones.
Also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, in just six years time “commercial drones will be commonplace”, the government has said, and many believe it will be far sooner.
There are inevitably still major technological hurdles to overcome, such as the distance they can travel, surviving difficult weather and what they can carry. Even more complex on the journey to them becoming mainstream, is the infrastructure.
While most people are aware of what happens on the roads and rail, the highways in the UK’s skies are undergoing a major review to bring them into the modern era. The changes are meant to enable the introduction of new technologies, such as drones and aerial taxis, as well as cutting noise and emissions.
When it comes to drones, one of the major hurdles is flying them “beyond visual line of site” , letting drones spread their wings and fly beyond the view of their pilots. The ability to do this opens up the potential of the technology but it is fraught with complications.
There are already some major trials under way to make this happen. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approved six pilots at the end of the year taking in the gamut of drone challenges in different locations, for different users.
This has all meant a significant shift in the way we divvy up the skies. The CAA trials use what is known as temporary reserved areas so they can fly about in the same space as other sky users, rather than shutting off bits of the airspace for up to three months, as had been done previously under the previous system, alarmingly named “temporary danger areas”.
They include one by Apian around the News Building at London Bridge, moving medical samples from laboratories across the dense, urban 2.4km stretch between the roof of Guy’s Hospital and St Thomas’s Hospital, with up to ten deliveries a day.
Another one is taking place in Cornwall, creating a permanent airspace to use drones to access hard to reach areas for bodies including the NHS, Royal Mail and Cornwall council. There have been other schemes in recent years. Royal Mail and the NHS used drones to take items “the last mile” to the Isles of Scilly in 2021, for example. Momentum is building.
With these, the Civil Aviation Authority is building up a bank of knowledge about how drones work and, crucially, how they can work in conjunction with other aircraft. Called the “known traffic environment”, regulators are trying to figure out a way to see all airspace users, not picked up on a conventional radar system. The technology is there, it just needs to be made widely available.
Just before Christmas the NHS announced that it was expanding a programme in Northumbria, partnering with Zipline and Apian, to deliver medical devices and prescriptions in the autumn of this year.
Drone development is going beyond these six projects. At the end of this year, Amazon expects to launch drone deliveries from some of its fulfilment centres, leading to faster delivery for items weighing less than 2.2kg. It has already been doing this for more than a year in California and Texas and claims that the new drone will go twice as far, be quieter and more weather resistant.
In numbers now rather out of date but which show the direction of travel, the data business Beauhurst reported that UK drone companies raised £32 million in 2020, up from £10 million in 2017. The most successful had a specific industry use, such as Hummingbird Technologies for agriculture and Sensat for the land and construction sectors.
By 2030 their introduction could be worth £45 billion, according to PwC, through job creation efficiency and cost-saving, and the consultancy predicts there will then be 900,000 drones in the UK’s skies, with an enormous environmental benefit.
Experiments are one thing. The big question now on the industry’s lips is how the UK can move from this period of small-scale trials, to normalised mainstream operations. This will mean working out how the system will be managed and how different types of aircraft will be regulated.
Yet at the current pace, a parcel could be wafted into your hands from the skies earlier than you think.
Katie Prescott is Technology Business Editor of The Times